A journey through the past

Sometimes, having a dramatic UFO encounter really sucks, especially if you consider yourself a rational, left-brain, analytical thinker. Because when you go public with it, “skeptics,” “believers,” and everybody in between makes certain assumptions, and next thing you know is, you’ve got a label hanging around your neck and the rhetorical sludge gets so deep and ridiculous you need scuba gear to keep from drowning in it.

“Remember that X-Files poster with the Billy Meier (beamship) photo, ‘I Want To Believe’? What the f*#! is wrong with people? They’ll believe anything! Well, you know what? Wanting to believe is a lot different from wanting to understand. Two completely different things. And as an extreme experiencer who’s also a skeptic, there’s no way I can win. I’ll never win this one. Never ever.”

This is an excerpt from a recent chat with David Biedny, the former co-host of The Paracast, a weekly webcast promoting discussions on various aspects of the paranormal. Biedny bailed three years ago, largely for reasons too off-topic to get into here. But it’s also true that the outspoken Biedny — a multi-media technologist and Photoshop pioneer — became disenthralled with the endlessly uninformed blovations emanating from both ends of the UFO peanut gallery.

Provocative, unsparing, pressing guests with a prosecutor’s zeal for detail, Biedny was primed to pounce at the first scent of BS, and his spirited colloquys often alienated great swaths of what the MSM calls the “UFO community.” Especially critical of evidence by fiat and quick to denounce those he considered hucksters, Biedny often shocked and alarmed die-hard “believers,” and rarely joined discussions at UFO seminars. Even though — with a number of paranormal encounters in his personal history — he had much to offer.

In 2006, on the front end of his four-year run with The Paracast, Biedny shared a remarkable first-hand story with listeners, about an early-evening encounter he had as an 11-year-old in Caracas, Venezuela, during the summer of 1974. Roughly the size of a full salami held at arm’s length, a dark, silent cigar-shaped object parked over the capitol city in broad daylight. Biedny, his mom, dad, and 8-year-old brother joined countless motorists and pedestrians who stopped dead in their tracks to watch what happened next. Three smaller objects descended from the apparent underbelly; two moved to the front of the bigger one, while a third went aft to complete a triangular configuration.

“We were almost underneath the thing,” Biedny recalls today from his home in New York. “I saw the bright light underneath this craft and I saw these — I remember them as discs, my brother remembers them as lights.” The spectacle held its form for a matter of minutes, not seconds. And then the whole thing, the entire formation, simply vanished. Even so, Biedny got an eerie feeling that whatever he had just seen was still there, lingering, perhaps still observing. Obviously, it left a life-long impression.

Anyhow, Biedny even invited his brother to the Paracast to share his own unique impressions. They recalled some Venezuelan newspaper coverage of the event, but neither could remember the exact date. And naturally, lacking that sort of corroboration, Biedny’s veracity was called into question by the usual suspects, and then some. After all, a brazen incident of that magnitude and duration should’ve been logged in somebody’s records somewhere, right? But an accounting of it – foreign or domestic – was nowhere to be found. Until a few months ago. When Venezuelan researcher Hector Escalante, who wasn’t even alive in 1974, began combing through microfilm archives. And he found it in the 8/1/74 edition of 2001, a Caracas daily.

Venezuelan researcher Hector Escalante rescued media coverage of this 1974 phenomenon over Caracas from oblivion just last month/CREDIT: 2001

There was at least one significant discrepancy between the Biednys’ recollection and the newspaper version. 2001 claimed reports began pouring in around 11:30 on the evening of July 31. Difficult to reconcile that point. However, 2001 also reported “thousands” of eyewitnesses to “four luminous objects,” flying not only above Caracas but in multiple locations across the country. Witnesses included an airline captain as well as government radar operators, who actually saw the UFO(s) but couldn’t pick them up on the screen. Furthermore, the sightings created such an uproar that then-President Carlos Andres Perez huddled with his cabinet, but “there was no formal interpretation of what happened,” according to 2001. Escalante discovered additional coverage of the same UFO encounter in two other Venezuelan dailies.

Anyone who sees this sort of weirdness doesn’t need third-person media coverage to validate that experience. On the other hand, backup never hurts, and there’s no doubt now that Biedny was a startled spectator to something that may well have rivaled the famous 1997 “Phoenix Lights” in scope and theater. If, that is, anybody outside Venezuela had ever heard of it.

“It makes me wonder how many of these mass-scale incidents have happened around the world that may have remained essentially lost to time due to the fact that the coverage doesn’t happen in English,” Biedny wonders. “English-speaking researchers just don’t know about it. I think the numbers are probably not insubstantial, and statistically significant. To me, that’s the bigger story. And the problem with understanding the anomalous fill-in-the-blank is always with human beings.

16 comments on “A journey through the past”

I would highly contest that Robert – stealth aircraft are painted matte black to avoid being detected by the eye at night. At a high enough altitude the only way a black matte object could be seen is by it’s blocking out of stars. Even then, you don’t get a great solid outline.

This is only one inconsistency in David Biedny’s tale, and far from the important one(s). Either way, a non reflective black object in a black sky w/light pollution from a city? No, I don’t believe for a second you’re going to see it. Show me a photo of a distant matte black object at night, like a piece of black construction paper, from a mere 20 feet away against a black sky. It’s not happening.

That statement is untrue. It sounds reasonable, but black objects are visible at night. For example, a black crow is visible at night. Take the blackest object you can find, set it far off, and the object is still visible.

It’s unfortunate that Biedny is placing so much emphasis on this article, when his story bears little to no resemblance to the event in it. Biedny claimed a cylinder shaped object, black in color, and stated a salami would just cover it when held at the outstretched arm. That’s a significantly huge object, but one that if black, and matte as he claimed, would not be visible at night. He further claimed a door or hatch was said to open at the bottom of the cylinder, and discs emerged, surrounded the object, and the whole thing disappeared. And yes, all in broad daylight.

Where is this in the news story? No resemblance whatsoever to Biedny’s tale.

I think it’s far more likely that Biedny saw the lights like everyone else, or simply read the story as a small child, and blew the rest far out of proportion.

Just your normal everyday armchair theorist who happened to accidentally photograph 10 daylight UFOs 7/1/90 then found a pattern on one of them thats also on numerous other UFO photos as well as countless ancient artifacts and the Nazca Lines in Peru. This sort of thing occurs daily for professional UFOlogists right? Then why has every newspaper in San Diego run the story on its front page?

David Biedney had an “experience” but exactly what it is was, from whence this object came, etc., is completely unknown to, and unprovable by, him.

Of course Biedney is also one of the biggest enemies of the Billy Meier case, which contains such mountainous evidence of actual, authentic, voluntary, wide awake contacts between an earth human being and extraterrestrial human beings – ongoing now for over 70 years! – as to make the case irrefutable.

But not for Biedney, who tried to “debunk” a Meier photo some years ago…not so successfully of course.

If he wants to try again, perhaps this new photo analysis will, well, let’s just say that he’ll definitely just want to talk about his “experience” and avoid looking foolish again.

The endless sea of phenomenon seekers in the “UFO community (industry)” and online armchair experts prefer to babble about non important stuff like this. Why? Because it resolves to absolutely NOTHING and keeps people going ooooh and aaaah instead of dealing with the most important events in all of human history – let laone the problems in their own lives.

After all, if the profiteers in MUFON and other organizations, etc., actually openly and honestly admitted – as their new director actually did conversationally (http://theyflyblog.com/mufons-director-meier-case-real-justtoo-good/07/25/2013) – that the Meier case is undoubtedly real, well what would be the point of sending their precious little field investigators out to chase lights in the sky?

And at this point in time, what does Mr. Biedney have to offer us other than his claims of being an “experiencer” because he saw and unidentified object?

Amazing how all these stories change over time. Also amazing how after all these years, there is never, never any real evidence that any of these things ever took place as claimed. The evidence is always in “dispute”. Hilarious. You would think that after all these “visitations”, some clumsy alien would have left behind some tine bit of indisputable evidence.

Hi Barry — I think the discrepancy goes directly to what David was saying about objectivity. If you review the 2006 Paracast interview, David states the event occurred shortly after an early dinner, around 6 p.m., when it was “still very light out.” Perhaps “broad daylight” is overstating matters. But yeah, video would’ve been great.

I am David’s Brother. I never recall David or I stating this event occurred in broad daylight, maybe that was misquoted somewhere. The event most definitely occurred late in the evening as w were walking to the “On Call” Pharmacy since all the other Pharmacies were closed (It was after 10 PM). What I wouldn’t give to go back in time with a decent Camera!

Some things improve with time. Although the above story relates that nothing was detected on radar, today more civilian authorities tend to use networks of radars. While individual operators may be able to switch to a primary display in real-time when something unusual is reported, there may be more information contained within the combined, digitized files from multiple radars covering a wider area; data files that can be analyzed more carefully after the event. (N.b. these data are usually recorded for potential air accident investigations.)
If (when) similar events reoccur, amateurs and official UAP research groups stand a better chance of obtaining evidence from these calibrated instruments than ever before.
(While there are never any guarantees, one expects future radar-visual cases to occur, given the existence of past radar-visual cases.)